"Romanticized and misapplied, individualism keeps us self-indulgent. It keeps us ignorant of contracts, of money, of benefits, of rights, of how the partnership between author and publisher ought to work, of the areas that threaten both publisher and writer. It keeps us in an adversary relationship at certain junctures where such a relationship is counterproductive. Individualism can also keep us dependent on foundation largesse, grants, fellowships, campuses, cloisters and handouts. And if things go on in this manner, individualism will idle us-it will keep us from the work we have chosen to do."

Toni Morrison on the need for a community of writers, “For A Heroic Writers Movement”

Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago Dies at 87

Jose Saramago, the Portuguese novelist who won the Nobel Prize for literature, has died, his publisher announced Friday. He was 87.

Saramago’s works include “Blindness,” “The Cave,” “All the Names,” “The Stone Raft” and “Seeing.” The Nobel committee cited Saramago’s restless need to invent wholly new worlds in his fiction when they presented him the award for literature in 1998. Saramago, the Nobel citation reads, “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.”

Blindness is my favorite of his. Rest in peace.

"i think we try to write our own endings a lot of the time instead of just letting life work itself out."

caitlin slinging truthsandwiches.

The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing. -Isaac Asimov

"What the internet is creating is a class of literate, gifted amateur writers, in an old tradition. Like Trollope, who was a British Post official all his working life, they write for love and because they must. Like Rohinton Mistry, a banking executive, or Wallace Stevens, an insurance executive, or Edmund Wilson, who spent his most productive years sitting in his big stone house in upstate New York and writing about what he damned well pleased. Samuel Pepys, who wrote the greatest diary in the language, was a high officials in the British Admiralty. Many people can write well and yearn to, but they are not content, like Pepys, for their work to go unread. A blog on the internet gives them a place to publish. Maybe they don’t get a lot of visits, but it’s out there. As a young women in San Francisco, Pauline Kael wrote the notes for screenings of great films, and did a little free-lancing. If she’d had a blog, no telling what she might have written during those years."

Roger Ebert in The golden age of movie critics

at the edge of everything

Stef and I went to go see Russell Banks speak this morning. I almost skipped because I worship at the Church of Sleep on Saturday mornings but I woke up on my own at 8:15 and off I went. I read Continental Drift and really liked it, with much of its action set in my home state of Florida which I know fortunately and unfortunately like the back of my hand. Banks is one of those writers I have always meant to read more of but life and films and other books and the internet (without a capital i) always distract me.

In this photo from Google Images, he looks like a cross between Hemingway and Sean Connery but Banks is truly handsome and youthful for his almost 70 years. Unlike lots of writers who seem to reside in their own egos while looking down at the rest of the world, Banks talked about his work, the places that have inspired him, his youth, technology, other writers in the most relaxed, charismatic manner possible. I keep thinking about things he said, especially about how for thousands of years people have just been trying to tell stories and that technology will change how those stories are delivered but will not affect the desire to produce or enjoy these stories. I kept thinking about the internet and blogging and self publishing and Kindles and wondering if we are watching the shift into this new way of delivering stories. Will it affect how we tell stories? Banks is curious and as I warm to these possibilities, I wonder as well.

Banks told the audience about how he moved to Miami at 18 and worked in a hotel moving furniture. Do people still do this? It seems like a very Bukowski thing to do and I sort of love him for it, especially as I see this experience in his work, the real life bleeding through everything else we do. I suppose we all have experience with this. It makes me think of when I withdrew from college for a semester or two and worked at an art studio and then at a library. I learned more about people in those months than I have in any undergraduate class. Well, I can’t say that’s entirely true as I love academia but I learned about things that I wasn’t used to in the same way that traveling has always put me a bit out of my element as I take in so many new things all at once. It gives me the same worries about seeing the world before I go to grad school. I don’t know if I can do what I want to do (tell stories) if I haven’t lived more. Writing requires experience, I’ve found.

He talked about the false notion that reading gives you a lightning strike sort of epiphany about life or your own identity. Rather, he discussed that change whether personal or societal begins at the edges of anything and works its way in steadily. This is how I feel about reading. The best things I’ve read that have affected me most are the things that have crept up on me and then haunted me quietly. There is no eureka moment but rather, art in any medium will stay in your brain and bloom into a realization later, changing you in a way that is most noticeable in hindsight. Life has few epiphanies but rather subtle hints that have been working their way into your view for a long time.

It feels like spring for the first time today, even in Florida. There is a lovely breeze but it is warm and I felt bad for the Orthodox Jews walking under the hot sun as I drove in my car. I did mostly everything on my index card to do list and ate lots of guacamole. I opened the windows when I got home and it feels like goodness is on its way in, slowly but it’s coming. Everything is coming and I cannot wait for another story to happen to me.

untitled (union square, new york) circa 1935 by eudora welty

“These are not diaries, but contain ideas for short stories and novels, some poems, notes on countries and cities I have visited, people I have met. At very back of these cahiers, quotations I copied out from other writers, etc.” Patricia Highsmith: “Inventory of hardcover first editions at Highsmith house, Dec. 1987”

Just a few days ago, I was running my fingers over my copy of Strangers on a Train, thinking of how I’d like to read some more Patricia Highsmith once finals were over, just absolutely lose myself in one of her thrillers, maybe finally get around to her short stories. This morning over tea, I read this review of a new biography about Highsmith which seems to deliver on all the things I’d previously heard about the famously shut-in writer. I’ve long fascinated been by Highsmith, having read Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley in quick succession over one summer as a teenager. A few years later, I found my interest in her reignited as I learned that she is one of writer Joey Comeau’s (of A Softer World fame) favorite writers.

I love her antiheroes, her amoral creations who not only pique our interest but make us question our own standards. With the aforementioned Ripley, as with many of her other characters, she blurs the lines of sexuality and decency, creating characters who cannot be clearly classified as traditionally good or evil but who intrigue us nonetheless. Highsmith herself was a fascinating creature, her own encounters and relationships with women inspiring her writing, specifically her groundbreaking lesbian novel, The Price of Salt. She began as a writer of superhero comics, an idea that fascinates me as a lover of comics. My mind fills with the possibilities of the things that Patricia Highsmith might have created in a graphic novel.

As, if not more, interesting as the characters she created, Highsmith lived a chaotic life, described as difficult and caustic by her closest friends. She was a misanthrope with a soft spot for animals and a sharp eye for the ugliest truth in humans. She died alone, a fact not shocking when you consider her personality; Highsmith considered this a a byproduct of her chosen profession. She once said, “I have Graham Greene’s telephone number, but I wouldn’t dream of using it. I don’t seek out writers because we all want to be alone.” As I sit at my desk editing a story, I wonder if that’s true.

NY Times: For Poe, This Has Been the Year to Die For

RICHMOND, Va. — Edgar Allan Poe took good care of his corpses. They are neatly cut up and craftily stowed beneath floorboards (“The Tell-Tale Heart”); they are walled into ancient catacombs where nothing is likely to disturb their well-earned eternal slumber (“The Cask of Amontillado”); they are encased in coffins that somehow permit them to emerge to take care of unfinished business (“The Fall of the House of Usher”). But the living — some of whom become those corpses — have a much harder time of it. They obsess, brood and hate; they are possessed by bizarre impulses; they wrestle with inchoate forces and often succumb, scarcely knowing the scope of their perversities.

That has pretty much been the fate of Poe as well. This year is the bicentennial of his birth, and while he never earned a secure living, was often sucked into alcoholic maelstroms, was unable to hold a job without incinerating his prospects and regularly lashed out at his literary contemporaries — while in life, in other words, he was a miserable conglomeration of self-justification, remorse, genius, fury and failure — as a corpse he has flourished mightily. And not just because of his inventive creations of the modern detective novel, horror tale and science-fiction story. Contemporary Goth subcultures feed on the themes that ooze from Poe’s work. And celebrations have been widespread and plentiful. …

Novelist Tim O’Brien in Vietnam

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It is August, 1948 and a young woman in a small New England town is preparing to leave home. She is nineteen years old and she is hopelessly, desperately in love. Tonight, she is ready, and after weeks of clandestine planning, she is going to elope. And everything is about to change.

Page from Anne Sexton’s scrapbook; continue reading here.

It is August, 1948 and a young woman in a small New England town is preparing to leave home. She is nineteen years old and she is hopelessly, desperately in love. Tonight, she is ready, and after weeks of clandestine planning, she is going to elope. And everything is about to change.

Page from Anne Sexton’s scrapbook; continue reading here.

It is August, 1948 and a young woman in a small New England town is preparing to leave home. She is nineteen years old and she is hopelessly, desperately in love. Tonight, she is ready, and after weeks of clandestine planning, she is going to elope. And everything is about to change.

Page from Anne Sexton’s scrapbook; continue reading here.

Four volumes hand-bound by Virginia Woolf.

Authors’ libraries held at the Ransom Center include those of W. H. Auden, the Coleridge family, E. E. Cummings, Guy Davenport, J. Frank Dobie, Arthur Conan Doyle (spiritualism and criminology), Alice Corbin Henderson, James Joyce, Oliver La Farge, Wyndham Lewis, Sir Compton Mackenzie, Christopher Morley, Ezra Pound, Anne Sexton, C. P. Snow, Ron Sukenick, and Evelyn Waugh. There are also collections of books that belonged to English composer Michael Tippett and the Herschel family of astronomers. In addition to providing the authors’ own copies of their works, these libraries offer insight into the owners’ reading and collecting habits. Many copies are annotated by their owners or inscribed to them by prominent friends.

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